The channels refer to specific radio frequency allocations. Anything below Channel 12 is "Very High Frequency", and anything above that is "Ultra High Frequency". The Channel number was basically arbitrary, but went up in frequency in numerical order, so Channel 5 had a higher frequency than Channel 17.
The higher the frequency, the shorter the wavelength, and in general the smaller the area of coverage. Fewer viewers. The big networks dominated VHF, megawatt transmitters that could reach the entire metro area and beyond. In the Atlanta area, we had all three major networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC on Channels 2, 5, and 11.
UHF was the domain of independent operators, who filled airtime with anything they could get. Mostly old TV shows and movies from syndicate distributors. Channel 17 was mostly old movies, while Channel 36 featured old TV shows. "Superman" and "The Lone Ranger". "Star Trek". Later in the evening, 1950s schlock horror or flying saucer films...
With an uneven format and transmission range that limited viewership and advertising revenue, it could be more challenging for the UHF stations to make ends meet. When Channel 17 ran into financial difficulties, Ted Turner pumped it up. UHF stations typically signed off at night, went off the air, but the Turner Superstation was 24 hours a day.
Apparently, Ted Turner was playing a long game.
(Also apparently, I watched a lot of television as a 1970s latchkey kid.)
Does The Giving Pledge still exist? Will this happen?
When I learned about this, the story was very applicable to me at the time, as my startup had acquired licenses for content that was historically sold directly to libraries by a salesman who would negotiate with each library individually. He used a standard contract. When we contacted the company to license content for display on the internet, they gave us a ridiculous contract with a small one time fee and access to display the content forever. Only after reasoning through their business model and history did we understand how this occurred, which was exactly the same type of gap that Ted Turner had exploited.
He essentially created the modern “billionaire giving to global causes” movement by deciding to donate a billion dollars during a speech.
Here's to you, Mr. Turner. Captain Planet was blatant propaganda, but you were largely responsible for my nerdy interest in animation.
I don't know much else about the man, but as a supporter of Bison I can commend that part of his legacy. An impressive vision and execution.
Side note, for those of you that enjoy biographies, his autobiography “Call Me Ted” is a real page-turner (pun intended).
A highly inspirational story of entrepreneurship, which includes a raw and authentic account of his flaws.
A true legend.
Rest in peace Ted.
He was everywhere in the late 70s and early 80s. WTCG -- The Super Station.
⸻
1. I once had an idea for a party game which involved people trying to guess whether a formerly prominent person was alive or dead.
Wonder what's going to be done with it now that he's dead.
I used to live in Newport, RI. I love sailing and introducing people to the world of sailing. When I had guests I asked them to watch this NBC video about Ted's 77 campaign [1]. It really captures the history of Newport, sailing, and Ted
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tr7-BwzceYI&list=PLXEMPXZ3PY...
Captain Planet and the Planeteers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Planet_and_the_Planete...
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/15/business/the-billionaire-...
Yes.
VHF covers up to and including channel 13
It's actually something people across the country may feel familiar with because "Channel 13" is New York City's PBS channel (WNET) and they export programming like Sesame Street out to PBS affiliates everywhere (not as much as WGBH in Boston, but a lot)
I am now administering the secret '70s latchkey quiz:
- Ricky, I want to be...
- This is Jim Rockford...
- Ladies, please don't...
- Bingo, Bango, Bongo, and...
- Missed it by...
- We can rebuild...The majority of people who have died since making the pledge did not meet the terms they agreed to and the vast majority of people still alive who made the pledge are on track to fail to meet the terms as their wealth is growing significantly faster than their charitable donations.
This is not to say everyone who has made the Giving Pledge is bad, there are some people on the list who have legitimately done a lot of good, but being on the list has overall been a meaningless indicator of actual outcomes.
Going from memory, and didn't verify.
We also had PBS at Channel 18, I believe.
(I tried to read what I wrote for errors, as autocorrect can smash any attempt at careful writing. But I didn't catch this.
Was invisible to me because I was reading the meaning of what I was attempting to say.
I think I just learned about semantic typos. Meme-os?)
2. Rockford Files (with James Garner)
3. ?
4. ?
5. Get Smart (created my Mel Brooks)
6. the Six Million Dollar Man (with Lee Majors)
I watched a lot more movies than TV shows as a kid. I miss the time when my idea of a real-life villain was Turner for colorizing B&W movies. God speed. RIP
1. ...in the show! -- I Love Lucy
2. ...at the tone leave your name and number and I'll get back to you. -- Rockford Files opening.
3. ...squeeze the Charmin! -- Charmin toilet paper commercials
4. ...and Irving. -- The Mosquitos on Gilligan's Island
5. ...that much! -- Get Smart
6. ...him. We can make him faster... -- the Six Million Dollar Man[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TBS_(American_TV_channel)#Turn...
It stopped giving the wealthy so much positive PR so a lot of them have simply stopped talking about it. Whether or not they still go through with it, who knows. I somewhat doubt they will.
The other problem people are quickly becoming aware of is that charities are ineffective ways to solve social problems. And, particularly for very wealthy and well connected people, the charities seem to be much more of a tax dodge with a glossy pamphlet rather than anything real.
https://www.rangemagazine.com/archives/stories/winter00/murk...
He's responsible for rejuvenating Atlanta. It grew into a reasonable city after he built the TBS, CNN, and Turner Broadcasting empire. Without him, Atlanta may have been closer to a Charlotte in size, and definitely could not have pulled the Olympic games.
He gave Atlanta a media presence and those that came after him turned it into a media production hub.
He also created Captain Planet, which raised millennials on environmental causes.
We wouldn't have had Cartoon Network, Toonami, or Adult Swim without his William Street studios.
He briefly owned the Atlanta Braves and was their owner during their 90's World Series win. He funded their stadium, which doubled as the Olympic Stadium during the games (and which is now a part of Georgia State University).
He may have created the Georgia Guidestones (sadly they were bombed) and reportedly recorded a secret message not to be played until WWIII / nuclear annihilation.
He did a lot of good.
If you support Bison, why commend someone who killed them for a profit?
I'm not sure I've run into a 'supporter' of a particular type of bovine before.
Why?
Bison are surely pretty comparable on a lbs mass to methane released ratio when fed with the same diets that cattle are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_TBS_(American_TV_ch...
there is a parable i cant quite remember, but something along the lines of "the starving kid does not care where the food comes from".
that doesn't quite capture it... but in this context: the people receiving the money/help do not care if they got it because of "reputation washing" or "real public good". they get the help in both scenarios, and that's what matters.
as long as the money is going to actual, real charities/non-profits/good causes... who cares whether the billionaire did it because they are truly generous or because they thought "this will look good in the news"?
Guess we’ll still have Ted’s Montana Grills for a while…
Of course there's enough news; they simply choose not to report on it. This is true both domestically and certainly around the world. Presumably this is a mixture of highly dubious editorial decision and some reasoning that this doesn't make money.
My memory is hazy, and I accepted it as-is at the time, but the idea that American news could be watched live shortly before the fall of the Soviet Union seems entirely wild.
I think it's strongly related to the market for "reaction videos" on youtube, or even the early-2000's VH1 shows where a famous/popular person would react to music videos. Perhaps people want to project their emotions onto an avatar?
Growing up, TV stations shut off around midnight. Quite the sea change.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/video/2015/jan/06/cnn-end-...
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/jan/06/cnn-apocalypse...
If he had not created a profitable enterprise, there would not be 45k wild bison roaming free with the same amount of dollars.
It's not like I want bison to die, but if an American is going to eat a bovid, it's much better for it to be a bison. The American great plains are big enough to support vast wild herds and sustainable, profitable enterprises, but in order for that to happen, Americans need to eat bison, not cows.
Meat is super efficient for protein - thats why every successful Civilization does it
> In 1996, Turner admitted, "For the 10 years I ran [the team], it was a disaster. ... As I relinquished control of the Braves and gave somebody else the responsibility, it did well."
When's the last time you heard a billionaire say something like that?
> "We're the only first-world country that doesn't have universal healthcare and it's a disgrace."
> Iran's nuclear position: "They're a sovereign state. We have 28,000. Why can't they have 10? We don't say anything about Israel — they've got 100 of them approximately — or India or Pakistan or Russia."
> dubbed opponents of abortion "bozos"
> In 2002, Turner accused Israel of terror
> in 2008, Turner asserted on PBS's Charlie Rose that if steps are not taken to address global warming, most people would die and "the rest of us will be cannibals".
There's more than wikipedia covers, but you get the idea.
The bison aren't roaming free on the land. It would be nice if they were, and there are efforts to restore wild bison herds, but these are commercial herds. Far better than cows and CAFOs.
Because they wouldn't exist otherwise.
We can argue all day about motives, but what really matters is action.
(maybe they do that now?)
The idea that you have to do good deeds without expecting any kind of reward or recognition seems distinctly Christian to me. For Christians, the intent of this requirement is to ensure people remain humble (pride is a sin, of course) but this clearly contradicts the (imo much more relevant) principle of self interest. You can't really expect people to do something for other people without some kind of reward -- be it the promise of eternal salvation, some kind of social credit, or simply an internal sense of satisfaction.
As long as people aren't merely simulating charity to receive it, I don't see any downside to allowing people a bit of social reward for their giving.
It was originally "Tech Broadcasting Service" and run by an MIT student group.
For the $50k purchase, the newly-named WMBR purchased a new transmitter.
A lot of the money never goes to the starving kid, it goes into foundations that act more as tax shelters than they do actual charitable organizations.
> who cares whether the billionaire did it because they are truly generous or because they thought "this will look good in the news"?
It matters when the scope of their giving doesn't match the PR-generating pledges they make, which is the real point of my post.
If someone gives their money away to a good cause, I don't care what their real motivation is, but if they say they are going to give >50% of their wealth to charity to generate PR and then they never do that (true for the majority of Giving Pledge pledgers) that is behavior I think it contemptable and worthy of being called out.
I do. I will accept the donation either way, but in terms of so much else, I fucking do.
Outside of film restoration, old movies should be enjoyed the way they were made.
Colorizing b&w images is still debated to this day.
Actors: Gary Burghoff Alan Alda Wayne Rogers Jamie Farr Loretta Switt Harry Morgan Mike Farrell David Ogden Stiers McLean Stevenson Lary Linville Cast of Gilligan’s Island Crocodile Dundee
Musicians: Pete Best Stuart Sutcliffe Frankie Avalon Annette Funicello
Politics: Henry Kissinger Geraldine Ferraro Jane Byrne Michael Bilandic Eugene Sawyer Eddie Vrdolyak
They had a web subscription product around 2006 that gave you access to just watch all these raw feeds from CNN Affiliates all over the world. It was like Periscope but all "professional" feeds.
Ps. Another memorable media portrayal of Turner, he was clearly the basis for the boss character in the 1994 cartoon The Critic.
We would not be in the pickle we are if she didn’t mindlessly scare and misinform people undermining a whole industry based on her misunderstanding.
- CNN anchor Suzanne Malveaux was married to Karine Jean-Pierre (Biden's press sec, 2022-5)
- CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour is married to James Rubin, (was Clinton admin asst. secretary of state for public affairs, 1997-2000)
- Jen Psaki's 2017 revolving-door when she was said to be actively shopping herself for a job at CNN while still Obama's WH communications director (no 12-month "cooling-off" period). Left WH 1/2017, joined CNN 2/2017.
- for decades now, CNN seems to function like a retirement home for Clinton-era operatives like James Carville and Donna Brazile. In particular this was a blatant conflict-of-interest in the 2016 primary (Hilary vs Bernie, and the DNC shenanigans). I've seen many bloggers say that TV loves these commentators not because they're that relevant or insightful, but because they steer candidates and their budgets towards big wasteful traditional media spends (and not more targeted internet campaigns, like Obama 2008 or Trump 2016).
- the legendary 2004 takedown of CNN's Crossfire debate show (a younger Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala) by Jon Stewart ("You're on CNN! The show that leads into me is puppets making prank phone calls! What is wrong with you?")
I don't find talking heads persuasive, and one simple antidote is to flick between coverage of the same issue on CNN, Fox, MSNBC, PBS, ABC/NBC/CBS, BBC, DW, RT, foreign channels, etc. to see conflicting narratives, or sometimes conflicting facts.
Maybe the better converse question is: when did CNN stop being any more credible and up-to-the-minute than other news sources (incl. internet ones, or SM)? Maybe late 1990s. Its rise and fall parallel the Clinton admin.
That's a funny thing to mark as "progressive" as I don't think that'd have been considered progressive until fairly recently. Plus, he walked it back.
> In 2002, Turner accused Israel of terror: "The Palestinians are fighting with human suicide bombers, that's all they have. The Israelis ... they've got one of the most powerful military machines in the world. The Palestinians have nothing. So who are the terrorists? I would make a case that both sides are involved in terrorism." He apologized for that and the remarks in 2011 about the 9/11 hijackers, but also defended himself: "Look, I'm a very good thinker, but I sometimes grab the wrong word ... I mean, I don't type my speeches, then sit up there and read them off the teleprompter, you know. I wing it.
He was also uncomfortably concerned with population growth.
> Turner also said in the interview that he advocated Americans having no more than two children. In 2010, he stated that the People's Republic of China's one-child policy should be implemented.
I'm not sure I'd call him progressive. Thinking Iran should have nuclear weapons doesn't seem to make sense from any perspective unless you want them to use them.
Frankly, he seems like pretty standard anti-natalist environmentalist to me.
Or like owning a mountain or a centuries-old tree. Does that even mean anything?
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/04/us/politics/trump-buffalo...
Mentally you tend to equally weigh both good and bad news over a long time span, but negative news gets a much quicker and stronger initial reaction, thus it gets priority. Just an evolutionary trait, don't wait to see if the shadow is a tiger just assume it is about to attack.
This is why social media ends up the way it is, that quick reaction is what the algorithms pick up on even if long term it isn't any different. It is a hard issue to overcome especially when it is a free market race to the bottom.
I have no clue how you could ever even estimate this sort of ratio. How do you even quantify the "number of things going on", let alone confidently split them into good and bad?
Also if you're in the Boston/Cambridge area, WMBR is a fun and weird listen and clearly sounds like college radio when compared to something like WERS.
this is covered by the "actual, real charities/non-profits/good causes" caveat in my comment.
The notes they could read in the movie credits about it being a colorized version simply told them that all of the colors in that movie had been added later.
I was so convincing that one of them interrupted his teacher in class to let her know she was wrong about the rainbows and where color came from. I had made it clear that everything that we saw as colored had the colors that were assigned by international agreement after people had become tired enough of the BWG palette to sit down and make it all change.
In the end, the teacher told him he was wrong and he argued about it so I got a call one day that he had been in trouble at school and that the teacher was not thrilled to hear his explanation so I needed to clear things up for him since he was not inclined to believe her at all. I'm not sure that I ever got that completely cleared up because, to me, it was just too funny that I was the most trusted source.
Thanks TED. R.I.P.
Once you get a taste of "bad" it dominates.
if you want to be mad about other things, like how wasteful super yachts are or whatever, by all means go for it. but that is outside the scope of my comment.
We'll eventually do that for all of history. At least the history we have samples of or can plausibly recreate.
I'd imagine playing one of those might be like living your life right now. Punctuated by lots of mundane, lifelike moments. Like reading an "internet forum" full of other period appropriate "humans".
https://www.bustle.com/articles/30501-i-tried-a-vintage-film...
At that point if you've already decided you want to colorize the film, there's a real question of how do you approach it, because being true to what was on set definitely isn't the right choice. So now you're playing with skin tones regardless.
I mean sure, some people do, the same as some people used to complain about overrepresentation of caucasians in some old movies set in what was then called “the orient”. I think the only ones who put up a fight are the Japanese who don’t like their productions ethnically misrepresented as much.
B&W highlights the stories better. With color you get more ambient context and sometimes that’s interesting.
Orthogonal to whether people find print vs video trustworthy or authoritative, which I think is conditioned by what each person grew up considering to be trustworthy or authoritative.
This was a pivotal time for news coverage. The only thing that is at the same level was the JFK assassination. Until then, newspapers were the main source of news. The JFK coverage is where TV took over with live coverage instead of reading yesterday's news. Throw in the live coverage of Oswald being shot, and it was pretty much a standing 8 count with the internet being the final TKO for newspapers. PBS did a special on this called "JFK: Breaking the News"[0]
Do you and they not have any vague understanding of how ranching works? Indeed, there seems to be misunderstandings here.
The philosophical question is interesting, but eating them once in a while is not what ranching is, and ignorance of where your food comes from isn’t cool.
Oil price shock and a curiously delayed hostage situation displaced Carter in the 1980 election. And we've debt-financed trillions in oil commodity market manipulating wars since.
From "The surprising story behind the making of 'Captain Planet'" (2021) https://grist.org/culture/captain-planet-planeteers-real-sto... :
> “Our mission was to inspire and to educate the next generation of environmental activists,” Pyle said. She and producer Nicholas Boxer made it a point to slip as much planetary realness into the show’s fantastical plotlines. In fact, Pyle says many ideas were taken directly from the Global 2000 Report to the President, a 1980 paper commissioned by Jimmy Carter that warned of environmental disaster should policies fail to account for the world’s booming population growth.
The Global 2000 Report to the President (aka "The Doomsday Report") https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Global_2000_Report_to_the_...
Looks like it was predictively close on population estimates, but the 100% increase in food price production wasn't accurate (though we do have soil depletion and foreign mineral depletion instead).
FAO Food Price Index: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAO_Food_Price_Index
Unknown how much affect there was on the indicator due to calling attention to the indicator with such report.
/? oil disasters prior to 1980: https://www.google.com/search?q=oil+disasters+prior+to+1980
Ixtoc I oil spill in 1979 (2nd after Deepwater Horizon, which also resulted in dying dolphins and fish and birds on the beach) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ixtoc_I_oil_spill
Earth Day (April 22nd) was created in response to the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Day#1969_Santa_Barbara_o...
Big oil lobbyists haven't paid their bills for foreign wars.
Over the estimated interval of 1980 through 2000, Gross National Debt to GDP ratio grew from 35% to 59%. GND-to-GDP is approximately 120% in 2026.
The Carter plan for renewables would've saved trillions of dollars and many lives compared to the 1980-1992 Reagan-Bush debt-financed oil wars.
FWIU the Limits to Growth report is more accurate than the Global 2000 report that - TIL - led to Captain Planet and the Planeteers for us kids back then.
Maybe the point is that the logic applies to literally every country having them, including the US, but that doesn't imply that starting a war to try to stop one of them from getting them will end up with a better situation.
To be clear, what I see as distinctly Christian is the idea that charity must be purely altruistic -- it's not seen as Christian to desire recognition for your charity, or to perform charitable acts with the hope of being rewarded with eternal salvation. They must be done purely out of duty to God, and love for others (which are essentially identical requirements, since "God is love").
But if there's ignorance behind that thought, I'm open to being educated.
It wasn't just skin tones. Wardrobe was picked for the resulting look on B&W film vs what it looked like in real life. Here's a pretty in depth article: https://www.screeningthepast.com/issue-39-first-release/desi...
This isn't exactly the same thing. Colorizing historical footage decides what the color is. A remake is an interpretation with nowhere near the same claim of accuracy and the audience 100% knows this. The social politics of this are incredibly important.
It would be interesting to know if, in say, 100-200 years, there is some alternative technology that could de-render todays CGI perfectly, and then replace it with some alternative, perhaps insert some form of practical effect in a convincing way? Would being able to do so be better to do just because it can be done?
Like, suppose that one of the more recent big budget movies, Transformers or whatever, could entirely have all of the CGI stripped out of them instantly, and then be replaced with some form of "less fake" effects in a different way. Would it be good to do so, if that were possible? For me personally, I'm very much in favor of rubber suits and fake blood over sticks with ping pong ball overlayed with graphics. [1] In spite of my preference though, I don't know if however many hundreds of people who had worked the digital modeling for all of those scenes would appreciate essentially deleting all of the thousands of hours they had put into the movie.
Bringing that back to B&W films, I think that if someone was really excellent at doing the set design for B&W films, it makes me wonder how they might react if someone insisted on "fixing" the film by colorizing it, and showing their set pieces in a way that they never intended for those pieces to be seen by the audience. Like, if they weren't outright upset with even the idea of doing it at all, perhaps they might insist on some sort of creative control on how each of those set pieces were colorized and portrayed in the final product. Obviously, that would then extend out to all of the other things too, like wardrobe, makeup, etc. I could see the complexity ballooning out to be as complicated and involved as making the movie was to begin with! For example, maybe the guy that scouted the original location for the film wouldn't have chose the spots he had chosen if he knew that people would be able to see it on giant TVs that they could pause every single frame of, and perform all kinds of upscaling and digital zooms in and out on.
[1] I am firmly in favor of practical effects over digital for everything, except small technical errors like a boom mic or a coffee cup in a shot, because I think that the constraints a movie set faces will demand either: incredible innovative solutions by the crew, or, those constraints force directors to scale their vision back to something more contained and manageable. It helps to show where the scope creep for a movie is, and where it's simply unnecessary. For example, Jaws has a great backstory regarding the constant issues of the mechanical shark, it really forced Spielberg to rethink how and when the shark would be shown, and when it would be better to let the viewers mind fill in the blanks.
That was kind of my point. I doesn't belong on that axis at all, especially trying to transpose a comment from decades ago onto the current political dividing lines between "left" and "right" when so many ideologies have shifted sides over that period.
> Worrying about overpopulation means worrying about the quality of life of future generations, whereas "natalism" à la Musk is basically worrying about how they can keep making themselves richer, while not giving a damn about what happens to the world or humanity afterwards.
One can be natalist or anti-natalist for a variety of reasons. There's no one ideology that leads a person to each conclusion. People have come to (anti-)natalism from both humanist and anti-humanist arguments (and a variety of other arguments).
> So Turner's concern about population growth, if not necessarily progressive, strikes me as very fitting and in line with the humanist, philanthropic positions shown by the other points mentioned about him.
Again, avoiding the left/right/conservative/progressive labeling as those terms are dynamic over time. He's essentially a Malthusian for humanitarian and environmental reasons. Which makes sense, given his age. He'd have been in his mid 20's through the 60s and that was a fairly popular viewpoint at the time.
Nobody was arguing about what is best for humans.
If the choice of existence for all pigs (randomly selected as an animal commonly used for food) was to live in factory farming conditions or for pigs to go entirely extinct, I'd rather they go extinct. Not for the benefit of humanity, but because never existing is a better outcome for those would-be pigs than living lives full of nothing but suffering.
See also: Is it possible to own a cat?
The rest of your comments confirm what I said. I am really unclear how you think I have misinterpreted your comment.
That said, I agree with you!
Or they are incredibly transient, fashion-led and led either by the least intelligent people available, or those who stand to gain from them.
Do I own this T-shirt if it can burn? Do I own this stick or am I just carrying it for a while? Is this my banana, or does everything belong to the universe?
But I'm happy to conclude this exchange with your feeling satisfied on that point. I don't imagine you're interested in an actual debate on substance, given that your only argument is essentially that I'm ignorant, and I don't know what I'm talking about.
Thank you for lending your expertise in this matter.
I wasn't specifically talking about the bison here which is why I randomly selected some other animal to talk about and made the choice more binary than it is in the real world.
I was just making a point that what is best for humans is hardly the only criteria to use to make these sorts of decisions for some people (myself included).
I would be happy to discuss the topic in more detail but your responses have so far consisted of telling me I don’t understand what you’re saying, but without clarifying your position further.
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CNN founder Ted Turner dead at 87
2:25 • Source: CNN
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CNN founder Ted Turner dead at 87
2:25
Ted Turner, the media maverick and philanthropist who founded CNN, a pioneering 24-hour network that revolutionized television news, died peacefully Wednesday, surrounded by his family, according to a news release from Turner Enterprises. He was 87.
The Ohio-born Atlanta businessman, nicknamed “The Mouth of the South” for his outspoken nature, built a media empire that encompassed cable’s first superstation and popular channels for movies and cartoons, plus professional sports teams like the Atlanta Braves.
Turner was also an internationally known yachtsman; a philanthropist who founded the United Nations Foundation; an activist who sought the worldwide elimination of nuclear weapons; and a conservationist who became one of the foremost landowners in the United States. He played a crucial role in reintroducing bison to the American west. He even created the Captain Planet cartoon to educate kids about the environment.
But it was his audacious vision to deliver news from around the world in real time, at all hours, that really made him famous – once his idea finally took off.

In 1991, Turner was named Time magazine’s Man of the Year for “influencing the dynamic of events and turning viewers in 150 countries into instant witnesses of history.”
Turner eventually sold his networks to Time Warner and later exited the business, but continued to express pride in CNN, calling it the “greatest achievement” of his life.
“Ted was an intensely involved and committed leader, intrepid, fearless and always willing to back a hunch and trust his own judgement,” Mark Thompson, Chairman and CEO of CNN Worldwide, said in a statement. “He was and always will be the presiding spirit of CNN. Ted is the giant on whose shoulders we stand, and we will all take a moment today to recognize him and his impact on our lives and the world.”
Turner was “a legend, he revolutionized the television business by creating the first 24-hour news channel right here at CNN,” Wolf Blitzer said Wednesday morning as he announced Turner’s death on-air.
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Ted Turner speaks on CNN Newsroom in 1995
0:58 • Source: CNN
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Ted Turner speaks on CNN Newsroom in 1995
0:58
“We’re all here doing this because of Ted,” Blitzer’s co-anchor Pamela Brown said.
“He was the original,” Christiane Amanpour said. “He made us all proud, he made us all hopeful, and he made us all strive for his vision of a better world.”
Just over a month before his 80th birthday in 2018, Turner revealed that he had Lewy body dementia, a progressive brain disorder. In early 2025, Turner was hospitalized with a mild case of pneumonia before recovering at a rehabilitation facility.
Turner is survived by his five children, 14 grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.
Turner began his media career at the age of 24 when he took over his father’s billboard company, Turner Outdoor Advertising, in the wake of the elder Turner’s suicide. He buried his shock and grief in work — but Turner wasn’t content to push other people’s products forever.
He bought up radio stations, then branched into television in 1970 by acquiring a struggling station in Atlanta known as Channel 17. He tried to boost the ratings by airing old sitcoms and classic films, at one point even hosting “Academy Award Theatre” himself.

Turner wasn’t interested in news yet. He decided to invest in sports instead, acquiring the rights to Atlanta Braves baseball games. Viewers and advertisers flocked to the channel, and as Turner turned a profit, he started to think bigger about TV.
In 1976 he beamed Channel 17’s signal up to a satellite and it became cable TV’s first superstation, reaching cable subscribers across the country.
Turner bought the Braves, and then the Atlanta Hawks basketball team, partly to keep the long-term rights to the TV programming, and partly because it was just plain fun.
As he built the Superstation WTBS, he set his sights even higher – a 24-hour news channel.
Turner was harshly critical of broadcast TV and establishment news judgments. “Part of the reason America had so many problems, he believed, was because his fellow Americans were so ill-informed,” former CNN journalist Lisa Napoli wrote in “Up All Night,” a book about the creation of CNN. Turner recognized “there was no better place to promote a variety of opinions than on allmighty television. With a news channel, he could quite possibly help save the world.”
A lot of people thought Turner’s idea was crazy. But he saw a huge opening in the marketplace.
“I worked until 7 o’clock, and when I got home the news was over,” he once said, referencing the 6:30 evening newscasts on the big networks. “So I missed television news completely. And I figured there were lots of people like me.”
Turner wanted to dramatically widen the aperture of television news, envisioning shows about business, health, sports and other subject matter. He admitted he knew “diddley-squat” about the news business, but he recruited the right people who did, like Reese Schonfeld, CNN’s founding president.

On June 1, 1980, CNN, the first 24-hour news channel, went live and has been on the air ever since.
Turner quickly expanded, adding a second 24-hour news network CNN2 (later renamed Headline News, then HLN) in 1982 and CNN International, which broadcast around the world, in 1985. He later added non-news cable channels including Turner Network Television (TNT), Turner Classic Movies (TCM) and the Cartoon Network.
In the mid-1980s, he acquired MGM’s library of more than 4,000 old films and stirred up controversy in the film community for colorizing many black-and-white movies, including “Casablanca.”
Out of all his networks, CNN was always his “baby,” but the network’s early years were marked by technical snafus during its long stretches of live broadcasting. Some critics dubbed it “Chicken Noodle News.”
Yet, Turner and his deputies knew they were creating something revolutionary.
“I lived for 20 years in my office,” Turner said. His office was inside CNN’s broadcast building in Atlanta. “I lived on a couch in my office the first 10 years.”
Longtime employees recall Turner sauntering into the newsroom wearing a bathrobe.

“He was one of us,” former CNN president Tom Johnson recalled. “He would be in his housecoat down having breakfast in the Hard News Café (the company’s cafeteria).”
When the Persian Gulf War broke out in 1990, the importance of a 24-hour news channel became clear. It was the first time a war was broadcast live – and it was only on CNN.
“What Ted made happen was just as important as the Internet revolution,” said former Turner Broadcasting CEO Terry McGuirk.
Turner was hailed as a visionary and earned TIME Magazine’s “Man of the Year” in 1991.
In 1996, Turner sold his networks to Time Warner for nearly $7.5 billion. He stayed on as a vice-chairman of Time Warner, heading up the company’s cable TV networks.
Robert Edward Turner III was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on November 19, 1938. At the age of 4, shortly after his sister’s birth, his parents sent young Ted to a boarding school, which he didn’t like.
“I wanted to be home,” he said.

Turner had a difficult relationship with his father, who had a weakness for alcohol and disciplined his son with a leather strap or a wire coat hanger.
“It wasn’t dangerous or anything like that,” Turner once recalled. “It just hurt like the devil.”
The family later moved to Savannah, Georgia, and his sister Mary Jean contracted a rare form of lupus when she was 12. The illness left her with brain damage and in severe pain for years until her death.
“She was sick for five years before she passed away. And it just seemed so unfair, because she hadn’t done anything wrong,” Turner said. “What had she done wrong? And I couldn’t get any answers. Christianity couldn’t give me any answers to that. So my faith got shaken somewhat.”
Turner was sent to several strict Southern military schools and his father had hopes of him getting accepted to Harvard. He attended another Ivy League school — Brown University — but his father cut off his tuition because he disapproved of his major, as he made clear in a letter he wrote to his son.
“My dear son, I am appalled, even horrified, that you have adopted Classics as a major,” the elder Turner wrote. “I am a practical man, and for the life of me I cannot possibly understand why you should wish to speak Greek. With whom will you communicate in Greek?
“I think you are rapidly becoming a jackass, and the sooner you get out of that filthy atmosphere, the better it will suit me.”

Before long, the money ran out and he dropped out, returning to Georgia to work for his father’s billboard company in Macon.
Turner was just 24 when his father shot himself and died in the upstairs bathroom at the family’s home near Savannah. It was March 5, 1963, and the elder Turner was under the influence of alcohol and pills, battling depression and worried he had overextended himself with a $4 million purchase that expanded his company, Turner Outdoor Advertising, into the South’s largest billboard company.
“He went against everything he taught me: ‘Be courageous and hang in there,’” Turner said.
At the peak of his career, Ted Turner — twice divorced with five grown children — began dating actress Jane Fonda in 1989. The two would marry in 1991 and become one of the nation’s most storied couples.
“At first they didn’t get along at all,” recalled friend and former President Jimmy Carter. “In fact, they didn’t like each other. I heard this from both of them. It was months later before they decided to try again. And they evolved into one of the nicest romances that I’ve ever known about.”

Ted and Jane stayed together for 10 years and, when they split, his anger at her conversion to Christianity was blamed, but the truth was more nuanced. She simply could no longer take a back seat to his larger-than-life personality or sustain his need for her constant companionship as they shuttled between his 28 properties. She was pushing 60 and no longer interested in living out of a suitcase.
“I would never love anyone like I love him,” she said. “But I just couldn’t keep moving in his world, along the surface for the rest of my life. I knew that I would get to the end of my life and regret not doing the things that I also needed to do for me.”
He was devastated when she left him and, as his marriage ended, Turner’s media empire began slipping away.
Time Warner had agreed to be purchased by Internet provider AOL in 2000 with the hopes that the merger would help the legacy media company survive and prosper during the dot-com boom.

But the Internet bubble burst in 2001 and the following year the new AOL-Time Warner sustained a record $99 billion loss, resulting in countless job cuts. It soon became known as the biggest mergers and acquisitions failure in corporate history.
Turner resigned as AOL Time Warner’s vice-chairman in 2003, and three years later announced he would not seek reelection to its board of directors.
He lost control of Turner Broadcasting, CNN, the Atlanta Braves, the Hawks – and his fortune, consisting mostly of company stock, was hemorrhaging – more than $7 billion in three years.
“I lost Jane. I lost my job here. I lost my fortune, most of it. Got a billion or two left. You can get by on that if you economize,” he told CNN’s Piers Morgan in May 2012. He said he was “brokenhearted.” He tried to win her back, but it was obvious the relationship was beyond repair. “We were so far apart philosophically, we couldn’t do it.”
Despite the breakup, Fonda and Turner always maintained a close friendship, speaking on the phone regularly and showing up at each other’s charity events.
“Just because people get divorced doesn’t mean they stop loving each other,” she said. “It may be hard for two people to live together, but I can’t ever forget the reasons that made me fall in love with him.”
Turner explained that he had “loved many people” but only been “in love” twice – once with Fonda and once with someone he wouldn’t name. Being “in love” implies permanence, he said – something he hadn’t experienced in all of his relationships.

Turner always had a philanthropic streak, but it began to move to the forefront in 1997, the year after he sold Turner Broadcasting to Time Warner. That’s when he pledged $1 billion to the United Nations. Making good on that pledge took a while longer than he had anticipated – he made his final payment to the UN in 2015 – thanks to the beating his fortune took after the 2001 merger with AOL.
When it was over, he was still a billionaire, but just barely.
Turner didn’t do anything in a small way, including reinventing himself. He was the second biggest landowner in North America, with 2 million acres spread over 28 properties, including 19 ranches in Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, Montana, New Mexico and South Dakota, as well as in Argentina. The first of his Ted’s Montana Grill restaurants opened in 2002, and now there are more than 40 in 16 states. He managed to bring bison back from the brink of extinction; he had the world’s largest private bison herd, with approximately 51,000 head.
His five children – Rhett Turner, Laura Turner Seydel, Jennie Turner Garlington, Teddy Turner and Beau Turner – serve on the board of the Turner Foundation. His other foundations include his United Nations Foundation, Nuclear Threat Initiative, Captain Planet Foundation and the Turner Endangered Species Fund.
Half a century ago, his father’s suicide thrust a $1 million billboard company into his hands. He often said that his father, who was 54 at the time he died, ran out of things to work toward. As a result, Turner was driven – relentlessly moving forward, never looking back.
Yet no matter how successful he became, Turner was often still trying to prove himself.
Fonda recalled how she cried when Turner told her about his childhood on their second date. They were driving around his 60,000-acre ranch in Montana, and he was passing the time, talking as he drove. Tears ran down her face.

“He literally couldn’t understand why I was crying when he told me stories about what his father did to him,” she said. “Children can’t blame their parents. ‘It’s always my fault; it’s being done for my own good. I must not be good enough.’”
“Given his childhood,” Fonda said, “he should’ve become a dictator. He should’ve become a not nice person. The miracle is that he became what he is. A man who will go to heaven, and there’ll be a lot of animals up there welcoming him, animals that have been brought back from the edge of extinction because of Ted. He’s turned out to be a good guy. And he says he’s not religious. But he, the whole time I was with him, every speech — and he likes to give speeches — he always ends his speech with ‘God bless.’ And he’ll get into heaven. He’s a miracle.”
This story has been updated with additional information.
CNN’s Elise Zeiger, Kimberly Arp Babbit, Liam Reilly and Dan Q. Tham contributed to this story.
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